> Nor are those worries solely the province of cranks and ideologues — Simon Michaux of the Finnish Geological Survey has actually done extensive research
On the contrary, Michaux tripped a few of my crank alarms, mention of EROEI being one of them.
On the contrary, Michaux tripped a few of my crank alarms, mention of EROEI being one of them.
Despite a writing a hundred page paper covering basic details of existing power generation technologies, he devotes only about a paragraph to establishing that assumption.
Additionally, there is a section dedicated to ocean shipping. Routes are currently chosen to minimize costs, traveling long distances on bunker fuel. Running those same routes on batteries would be prohibitively expensive. Instead of concluding that in the future we will do ocean shipping differently because the cost minimization will work out differently, Michaux simply adds that to the tab of batteries that we would need to decarbonize.
"ERoEI is unimportant and is being used incorrectly"
> In this article I will show that ERoEI is unimportant by itself. It usually does not matter if ERoEI is increasing or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any guidance about how much net energy will be available to us in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure, unless it is lower than 1, which it almost never is. Although different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important.
More specifically, Michaux seems unaware that renewables have overtaken fossil sources in terms of EROEI so even if you think it's a useful measure, you need to use really out of date sources to calculate that renewables lose on this metric:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-11-10/eroi-of-re/
and the paper that the above podcast discusses: